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Four Poems by Tom Sleigh Space Station My mother and I and the dog were floating Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted Just below the ceiling. The dead who had been crushed By gravity were free to move about the room, To take their place at supper, lift a fork, knife, spoon— A spoon, knife, fork that, outside this moment's weightlessness, Would have been immovable as mountains. My mother and I and the dog were orbiting In the void that follows after happiness Of an intimate gesture: Her hand stroking the dog's head And the dog looking up, expectant, into her eyes: The beast gaze so direct and alienly concerned To have its stare returned; the human gaze That forgets, for a moment, that it sees What it's seeing and simply, fervently, sees… But only for a moment. Only for a moment were my mother And the dog looking at each other not mother Or dog but that look—I couldn't help but think, If only I were a dog, or Mother was, Then that intimate gesture, this happiness passing Could last forever…such a vain, hopeless wish I was wishing; I knew it and didn't know it Just as my mother knew she was my mother And didn't…and as for the dog, her large black pupils, Fixed on my mother's faintly smiling face, Seemed to contain a drop of the void We were all suspended in; though only a dog Who chews a ragged rawhide chew toy shaped Into a bone, femur or cannonbone Of the heavy body that we no longer labored To lift against the miles-deep air pressing Us to our chairs. The dog pricked her ears, Sensing a dead one approaching. Crossing the kitchen, My father was moving with the clumsy gestures Of a man in a space suit—the strangeness of death Moving among the living—though the world Was floating with a lightness that made us Feel we were phantoms: I don't know If my mother saw him—he didn't look at her When he too put his hand on the dog's head And the dog turned its eyes from her stare to his… And then the moment on its axis reversed, The kitchen spun us the other way round And pressed heavy hands down on our shoulders So that my father sank into the carpet, My mother rested her chin on her hand And let her other hand slide off the dog's head, Her knuckles bent in a kind of torment Of moonscape erosion, ridging up into Peaks giving way to seamed plains With names like The Sea of Tranquility —Though nothing but a metaphor for how I saw her hand, her empty, still strong hand Dangling all alone in the infinite space Between the carpet and the neon-lit ceiling. [First publication in Threepenny Review Collected in Space Walk, Houghton Mifflin, March 23, 2007] Nobody Line after line smearing off into elephantine scrawls as she tries to recall which way the pencil goes, my friend’s wife who can’t organize her mind to spell out her name sits staring at the bookshelf bowed under the weight of the thousand thousand rivulets of print she can’t remember writing. Her mind keeps scabbing over—and then she picks it and picks it until it bleeds…and she’s herself again, her heart rejoicing that she’s Anne and not someone other who afflicts her like a stranger hiding in her bedroom, whispering with affable, red—faced jocularity that if you’re nobody and nobody’s tormenting you why do you cry out? [First published in The New Yorker Collected in Space Walk, Houghton Mifflin, March 23, 2007] Oracle Because the burn's unstable, burning too hot in the liquid hydrogen suction line and so causing vortices in the rocket fuel flaming hotter and hotter as the "big boy" blasts off, crawling painfully slowly up the blank sky, then, when he blinks exploding white hot against his wincing retina, the fireball's corona searing in his brain, he drives with wife and sons the twisting road at dawn to help with the Saturday test his division's working on: the crowd of engineers surrounding a pit dug in snow seeming talky, joky men for 6 a.m., masking their tension, hoping the booster rocket's solid fuel will burn more evenly than the liquid and keep the company from layoffs rumored during recess, though pride in making chemicals do just what they're calculated to also keys them up as they lounge behind pink caution tape sagging inertly in the morning calm: in the back seat, I kick my twin brother's shin, bored at 6:10 a.m. until Dad turns to us and says, in a neutral tone, Stop it, stop it now, and we stop and watch: a plaque of heat, a roar like a diesel blasting in your ear, heatwaves ricocheting off gray mist melting backward into dawn, shockwaves rippling to grip the car and shake us gently, flame dimly seen like flame inside the brain confused by a father who promises pancakes after, who's visibly elated to see the blast shoot arabesques of mud and grit fountaining up from the snow-fringed hole mottling to black slag fired to ruts and cracks like a parched streambed. Deliriously sleepy, what were those flames doing mixed up with blueberry pancakes, imaginings of honey dripping and strawberry syrup or waffles, maybe, corrugated like that earth, or a stack of half-dollars drenched and sticky…? My father's gentle smile and nodding head— gone ten years, and still I see him climbing slick concrete steps as if emerging from our next door neighbor's bomb shelter, his long-chilled shade feeling sunlight on backs of hands, warmth on cheeks, the brightness making eyes blink and blink… so like his expression when a friend came to say goodbye to him shrunken inside himself as into a miles-deep bunker… and then he smiled, his white goatee flexing, his parched lips cracked but welcoming as he took that friend's hand and held it, held it and pressed it to his cheek… The scales, weighing one man's death and his son's grief against a city's char and flare, blast-furnace heat melting to slag whatever is there, then not there— doesn't seesaw to a balance, but keeps shifting, shifting…nor does it suffice to make simple correspondences between bunkers and one man's isolation inside his death, a death he died at home and chose…at least insofar as death allows anyone a choice, for what can you say to someone who's father or mother crossing the street at random, or running for cover finds the air sucked out of them in a vacuum of fire calibrated in silence in a man's brain like my father's —the numbers calculated inside the engineer's imagination become a shadowy gesture as in Leonardo's drawing of a mortar I once showed my father and that we admired for its precision, shot raining down over fortress walls in spray softly pattering, hailing down shrapnel like the fountain of Trevi perfectly uniform, lulling to the ear and eye until it takes shape in the unforgiving three dimensional: as when the fragile, antagonized, antagonistic human face begins to slacken into death as in my own father's face, a truly gentle man except for his work which was conducted gently too— since "technicals" like him were too shy for sales or management, and what angers he may have had seemed to be turned inward against judging others so the noise inside his head was quieter than most and made him, to those who knew him well, not many, but by what they told me after he died, the least judgemental person they'd ever known—who, at his almost next to last breath, uncomplaining, said to his son's straining, over-eager solicitation, —Is there something you need, anything? —That picture—straighten it… his face smoothing to a slate onto which light scribbles what? a dark joke, an elegant equation, a garbled oracle? [First published in Colorado Review Collected in Space Walk, Houghton Mifflin, March 23, 2007] The Breeze for Ed Robbins Like code for a lover’s murmurings, MIA IED blew in on the breeze from some place other than the place of pleasure I remember, bower too far ever to get back to now in the alphabet war war was waging… The language of that breeze was fluent, calming, its coolness almost chill but hoarding July heat that would turn the dunes to an abstract shimmer jets from the base would penetrate, disappearing an instant before piercing through glare, wings tilting sunlight toward flattening ocean, a TV on somewhere down the leafy lane shrilling a siren the breeze altered, catching it up, softening it to almost human keening, though for what or who the breeze wasn’t saying: how disjunct it felt, the breeze blowing some memory of distant pleasure mingling with pleasure now of a body next to mine—my weirdness of thinking, as the breeze cooled my flank, of my friend putting on his helmet and Kevlar vest, fitting the Kevlar with a lover’s gesture up between his legs so the family jewels would be locked away, and hearing him joking this was the way the middle-aged of either sex ought always to dress to go out to the bars, this was the way what the breeze wasn’t saying and what my friend was by not saying it, this was the way the acronyms MIA IED partook of the breeze’s other murky meanings— not saying what my friend would later show me, all of it coming together so confusedly but as if the breeze were words the acronyms spelled out before there were conditions to bring them to the tongue rooting them in air, letter on letter opening and flowering—oh come off it, fuck it, stop all this deployment of flowers and figures to get around what was right there on the ground, the glistering strangeness of it lying in the sun, skull cap blown off, thick black luxurious hair of a suicide bomber, like a wig hung in a well-dressed window in one of the salon-type places in an opulent mall, hair a breeze rippled ever so slightly, first this hair, that, lifting, subsiding, the breeze stroking forelocks and tresses that nestled on the shoulders minutes before my friend took the video—that breeze was blowing across desert and ocean all the way to here, if only in my mind thinking to join that soughing to this feeling of naked flanks cooling after waking a few inches away, breeze flowing in the space between cooling that place I wanted to get back to when the poem began but will never enter except in words the breeze does or doesn’t understand, Missing In Action, Improvised Explosive Device taking on the aura of words the breeze spoke eons ago but before there was something like a war to give them such repletion and ardor. [First publication in Threepenny Review Collected in Space Walk, Houghton Mifflin, March 23, 2007] | ||||||||||||
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